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Frictions in Polycentric Administration with Non-Congruent Borders: Evidence from Ohio School District Class Sizes

Public managers who operate within cross-jurisdictional governance regimes face substantial difficulties in facilitating network collaboration. Scholars have long suggested that non-congruence of geographic borders can create coordination problems among the political communities within polycentric administrative units. A frequently reoccurring example of such coordination problems arises in cases where municipalities and school districts have non-congruent borders, creating fiscal externalities in residential development land use decisions. Using GIS data from 611 Ohio school districts and 1,585 municipalities in 2000, we calculate the degree of non-congruence between school district and municipal territory to test for evidence that non-congruence of municipal-school district borders influences school district class size. The results indicate that schools with non-congruent borders do experience substantively larger class sizes. Furthermore, these effects seem to increase with the degree of non-congruence. Our findings are robust to model specification and consistent across OLS and treatment effects regression estimates. Policy implications for state-encouraged consolidation of school districts are discussed as well as theoretical and empirical implications of non-congruent jurisdictional borders for governance studies more generally.

Date posted: January 6, 2012
; Last revised: December 30, 2012

Suggested Citation

Ross, Justin M. and Hall, Joshua C. and Resh, William G., Frictions in Polycentric Administration with Non-Congruent Borders: Evidence from Ohio School District Class Sizes (January 6, 2012). Forthcoming, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory; Indiana University, Bloomington: School of Public & Environmental Affairs Research Paper No. 2012-01-01. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1980843 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1980843

Contact Information

Justin M. Ross (Contact Author)

Indiana University - School of Public & Environmental Affairs ( email )